Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 5

violet, hepatica.
Scarlet:--Columbine.
From this list it ought to be plain that April is a dainty queen, wearing a dress of cheerful green, a bodice of white, with violets in her hands, pink in her cheeks, and a single scarlet columbine in her wealth of golden hair, which indeed comes nearly being the portrait of Dione herself. Or, as one of the poets has better described her:
April stood with tearful face With violets in her hands, and in her hair Pale wild anemones; the fragrant lace Half-parted from her breast, which seemed like fair, Dawn-tinted mountain snow, smooth-drifted there.
In this long list of April flowers--some observers will be able to make it still longer--there are many favorites. The pretty rue-anemone recalls the tradition that Anemos, the wind, chose the delicate little flowers of this family as the heralds of his coming in early spring. And in the legend of Venus and Adonis the anemone is the flower that sprang from the tears of the queen as she mourned the death of her loved one. Theocritus put the wind-flowers into his Idylls, and Pliny said that only the wind could open them. The Spring beauty has as rich a legend, for it was the Indian Miskodeed, left behind when Peboan, the winter, the Mighty One, was melted by the breath of spring. The toothwort (dentaria laciniata) is sometimes known as the pepper-root, and every school boy and girl living near the woods is familiar with the taste of its tubers and the appearance of its cross-shaped flowers. The plumy dicentra, or Dutchman's breeches, seems so feminine as to be grossly misnamed until we remember that it was first discovered in the Rip Van Winkle country. The wild ginger with its two large leaves and its queer little blossoms close to the ground is another delight to the saunterer along the rocky slopes, where the feathery shad-bush--the aronia of Whittier--with its wealth of snowy blossoms and the wild plum not far away, with its masses of pure white, are inspirations to clean and sweet lives, calling to mind the lines of Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can.
In rocky fields and hillsides and dry open woods, the dwarf everlasting (Antennaria plantaginifolia) with its silvery-white little florets set in delicate cups, is one of the first species of the great composite family to bloom. We take it from between the rocks and think of those lines of Tennyson, which John Fiske declared to be among the deepest thoughts ever uttered by poet:
Flower in the crannied wall I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all in my hand Little flower,--but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.
Even more innocent, fresh and fair, is the bloodroot, with its snowy petals, golden center and ensanguined root-stock which crimsons the fingers that touch it. This is the herb, so the legend says, which the Israelites in Egypt dipped in sacrificial blood to mark their doorposts. As long ago as last November we dug up one of the papery sheaths and found the flower, then about a half inch long, snugly wrapped in its single leaf; and now the pale green leaf has pushed up and unfolded, showing the fragile flower in all its beauty.
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Strange contrasts we see in some of these April flowers. Some of them open their star-like eyes for a day or two and dot the floor of the woods with beauty and then their little contribution to the spring is done and they are seen no more until another year. They bring us beauty and sweetness and then they pass from us, like the sweet and childish but perfect lives we all have known and loved. In contrast to such as these there is the Jack-in-the-pulpit of the April woods which has no floral envelope of beauty, no fragrance, no inspiration, so busy is it storing up its swollen fortunes down in the bank, leaving behind it a tuber so rank and tainted that even the Indians couldn't eat it until they had first roasted it, then ground it into powder, and finally made it into a kind of bread. But sordid-lived accumulators, herbaceous and human, have been with us since the world began. Laban was a monopolist of pretty daughters and fine live stock,[TN-2] and Theocritus, in his day, was moved to say that "Money is monarch and Master," and to exclaim:
Fools, what gain is a world of wealth in your houses lying? Wise men deem that in that dwells not true pleasure of riches, But to delight one's soul.... Only the muses grant